Open Source Summit

The summit was hosted by O'Reilly & Associates, a company that has been symbiotic with the Open Source movement for many years.

On April 7th, 1998, a select group of the
most influential people in the Open Source community gathered in
Palo Alto to meet each other, consider the implications of
Netscape's browser source release, and discuss where the Open
Source movement is headed (and, especially, how it can work with
the market rather than against it, for the benefit of both).

The summit was hosted by O'Reilly & Associates, a company
that has been symbiotic with the Open Source movement for many
years. Linux's own Linus Torvalds attended. The inventors of all
three major scripting languages were present: Larry Wall (Perl),
John Ousterhout (Tcl) and Guido Van Rossum (Python). Eric Allman
(Sendmail) and Paul Vixie (BIND/DNS) were present, representing
their own projects and the BSD community. Phil Zimmerman, the
author of PGP, was there too, as was John Gilmore, a co-founder of
Cygnus and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Brian Behlendorf
spoke for the maintainers of Apache. Jamie Zawinski and Tom Paquin
represented Netscape and mozilla.org. For my semi-accidental role
in motivating the Netscape source release with “The Cathedral and
the Bazaar”, I also had the honor to be among those
invited.

We met from 8:30AM to 5PM, following up with a well-attended
press briefing. It was invigorating just to be around the amount of
intelligence and accomplishment there, and a bit sobering to
realize how absolutely critical their work has become—not just to
the hacker culture but to the world expecting the Internet to
become the vital communications medium of the next century.

One of the most important purposes of the meeting was simply
to permit everyone to meet face to face, shake hands, look in each
others' eyes and hear each others' voices. Many of us had never
actually met each other before, despite having been in e-mail
conversations for many years. Tim O'Reilly felt (correctly, I
think) that Net contact has not been quite enough as a community
builder; that the opportunities and challenges we face now require
an attempt to build more personal trust among the chieftains of the
major Open Source tribes.

In that, I think, the meeting was very successful. But it
also certainly dealt with substance as well. We discussed different
perspectives on the Open source/free software phenomenon and
different definitions of it. One of the meeting's important results
was a general agreement that, in all the variant definitions,
public access to source was the most important
and only absolutely critical common element.

We discussed the vexing issue of labels, considering the
implications of “freeware”, “sourceware”, “open source”, and
“freed software”. After a vote, we agreed to use “Open Source”
as our label. The implication of this label is that we intend to
convince the corporate world to adopt our way for economic,
self-interested, non-ideological reasons. (This is the line of
attack I've been pursuing though www.opensource.org and many recent
interviews with the national press.)

We talked about business models. Several people in the room
are facing questions about how to ride the interface between the
market and the hacker culture. Netscape is approaching this from
one side; Scriptics (John Ousterhout's Tcl company) and Eric
Allman's commercial Sendmail launch are approaching it from the
other. No one is certain yet what will work, but we were able to
identify common problems and some possible strategies for attacking
them.

We talked about development models—the various ways in which
projects are organized, the strengths and weaknesses of each model,
and what our individual experiences have been. There were no magic
insights, but again it seemed helpful to recognize common
problems.

We all understood this meeting could be only a beginning.
Late in the day we developed a tentative agenda for a larger
follow-up conference which O'Reilly may host later in the year. We
hope to bring other key people from the Open Source community in on
that follow-up—one of the last things Tim asked us to think about
was who should have been with us, but was not.

The day ended with a well-attended press briefing at which
all of us answered questions from Bay Area and national
reporters—some got the message, some didn't. For every one who
genuinely wanted to understand the logic of the Open Source
approach, there was another who repeated
“let's-you-and-him-fight” questions about Microsoft. Still, the
first burst of publicity about our gathering (it is two days later
as I write) has been very positive.

We are entering a very exciting time. In the wake of the
Netscape release, the Open Source community has achieved a
visibility it never had before. We're making friends in new places
and meeting new challenges. The larger world we're now trying to
persuade to adopt our way doesn't care about our factional
differences; it wants to know what we can do for it that is
valuable enough to motivate a major change in the ground rules of
the software industry.

To do that persuading, we'll need to pull together as one
community more than we have in the past. We—not just the Linux
community but the BSD people, the Perl, Python and Tcl hackers, the
Internet infrastructure people and the Free Software
Foundation—will need to present one face and speak one language
and tell one story to that larger world.

That is, ultimately, why this meeting was so important. All
of us came away with a better sense of what that story is and how
each of the major tribes fits into it. Just the fact that we faced
the reporters (and, by extension, the rest of the world) together
was a very powerful statement. The summit was a good beginning—one
to build on in the coming months.

Eric S. Raymond is a
semi-regular LJ contributor. You can find more of his
writings, including his paper “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, at
http://www.ccil.org/~esr/. Eric can be reached at
esr@thyrsus.com.